Prose: The second volume dealing with W.H Auden's prose reflects a period of crucial change in his life, as well as that of the whole 20th century writes John Montague.
There are complicated novelists, from Tolstoi to Graham Greene, but somehow, since the Romantics, poets are seen as sexier, perhaps because they have more time ("poets-in-waiting", as Kavanagh observed.) And some of that spare time is spent in earning the small change of lectures and reviews.
For Auden, the fallow time between poems was served by a fertile, questing intelligence, fascinated by theology as much as poetry. The second volume to deal with Auden's miscellaneous prose reflects a period of crucial change in his life, as well as that of the whole 20th century. He had first come to New York with Christopher Isherwood on their way home from the China of Auden's sonnet sequence in Journey to a War. At a reading they gave with Louis MacNeice, destiny struck in the dubious shape of a chubby blond boy from Brooklyn College called Chester Kallman.
According to Auden's faithful editor, Edward Mendelson, the poet experienced a glimpse of Eros "not unlike the 'vision of Agape' that he had experienced in 1933". With his almost androgynous sense of humour, Auden declared that he had met "Mr Right", and thereafter regarded himself as not only married but monogamous. Yet what if Mr Right is a shite?
But I am being tempted into biography. As well as the private, Auden's professional life was affected not only by the move to America and falling in love, but also the death of Yeats. Although he had come to modern poetry through Eliot's Wasteland, he had a profoundly ambiguous admiration for the great Irish Master. And he argues the case in several brilliant assaults, like 'The Public v the Late Mr William Butler Yeats'.
His main objection, echoed by others such as Anthony Cronin, is to Yeats's preoccupation with magic, which he regards, rather loftily, as suburban "mumbo-jumbo". And it is extraordinary how the Victorian fascination with the occult, in response to Darwinism, seems to have left no legacy. Yet although exotically shawled ladies, presiding over séances with crystal balls, seem to be an extinct species except in travelling circuses, magic remains central to any understanding of the career of a later English poet like Ted Hughes. And could it be Yeats's revenge that Auden appears on the ouija board of American poet James Merrill's extraordinary epic poem?
Even Auden's famous poem, 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats', is ambivalent, declaring, on the one hand, that "poetry makes nothing happen" while asking the poet to "Teach the free man how to praise". In the same year, there was his wonderful elegy for Freud, 'An important Jew who dies in exile'.
But the most important world event for Auden was the outbreak of war. Once again he was deeply ambiguous about the role of the poet, and in a review of Rilke, he observes: "When the ship catches fire, it seems only natural to rush importantly to the pumps, but perhaps one is only adding to the general confusion and panic: to sit still and pray seems selfish and unheroic, but it may be the wisest and most helpful course."
Why then did he write such a splendid poem on the second World War, with lines that resonate again with startling prescience, such as "The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night"?
It was naughty of Auden, however, to suggest that if the Germans had invaded Ireland, Yeats might have behaved like Knut Hamsun. Another Irish writer whom he admires is Shaw, "For he really is a great man, too intelligent not to know what conclusions would follow, but also too good-hearted and too humble to accept them".
This is the frisky side of Auden, who believed sternly in light verse, and adored Byron and Pope. Shaw's famously astringent humour must have appealed to his sense of play, and he also contended that Shaw was "probably the best music critic who ever lived", the Rossini of English letters.
This playful side of Auden is obviously more evident in Volume One (Prose; Volume I. 1926-1938 by W.H. Auden, Faber ), with the equivocal young genius finding his way, praising the gnomic poetry of John Skelton, writing the best single essay on Pope that I have ever read, as well as a seriously light-hearted introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse. A good deal of Volume One is taken up with the two famous travel books, the aforementioned Journey to a War and Letters from Iceland, written with Louis MacNeice.
'Their Last Will and Testament', with its comment on the private lives of contemporaries, is less shocking now, and the real defence for this arch aspect of Auden appears in a long essay called 'In Defence of Gossip'. One is glad to have such scrupulously annotated versions of the travel books, although they hardly seem to belong in a context of miscellaneous prose. (Close readers of John Banville's The Untouchable will be amused to realise that MacNeice's camp letter from Iceland, from "Hetty" to "Nancy", is a reference to his heterosexual self addressing his homosexual friend, Anthony Blunt, with many fey mentions of "that wicked Maisie", meaning Auden. Would Seamus, Derek and Michael dare to be as mischievous in their missives?)
I called on Auden once, for professional reasons. I was at Yale graduate school at the time, hating the "preppie" atmosphere, the spoilt striplings in sawn-off jeans. But my saviour was Norman Holmes Pearson, a diminutive near-hunchback who lectured on American literature and seemed to know everybody, especially Auden, with whom he had edited Poets of the English Language. He installed me as first reader for the Yale Poetry Series, something I sweated over.
So I called on the great man in his New York flat. What struck me was the combination of disorder - books strewn around, unwashed cups on a cluttered table - and absolute focus when he spoke. How could he work in such chaos, I still wonder. But to judge by these two tomes, work he certainly always did.
John Montague was the first Ireland Professor of Poetry, and is currently working on a book of poems, and translations from the French
The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Prose: Volume Two, 1939-1948. Faber & Faber, 556 pp. £30